Recently, agent-based software technology has received wide attention by the research community due to its valuable benefits, such as reducing the load on networks and providing an efficient solution for the transmission challenge problem. However, the major concern in building agent-based systems is related to the security of agents. In this paper, we explore the techniques used to build controls that guarantee both the protection of agents against malicious destination machines and the protection of destination machines against malicious agents. In addition, statistical-based analyses are employed to evaluate the level of maturity of the protection techniques to preserve the protection goals (the code and data, state, and itinerary of the agent), with and without the threat of attacks. Challenges regarding the security of agents are presented and highlighted by seven research questions related to satisfying cyber security requirements, protecting the visiting agent and the visited host machine from each other, providing robustness against advanced attacks that target protection goals, quantifying the security in agent-based systems, and providing features of self-protection and self-communication to the agent itself.

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Recently, agent-based software technology (ABST) has received widespread attention from the research community and users. However, security issues facing ABST are critical. When a mobile agent migrates from their home machine to perform tasks, the agent becomes vulnerable to attacks by the destination machine, which has full control over the visiting mobile agent. To address this security issue, we propose a dummy task selection (DTS) approach to protect the mobile agent by confusing the attacker (destination machine) with regard to distinguishing the real task among dummy attacks. Considering that side information may be employed by the attacker to perform advanced attacks, we introduce improved DTS as an enhancement of the DTS approach. The improved DTS approach generates strong dummy tasks based on execution probabilities that lead to the highest entropy. Unlike previous approaches, the improved-DTS approach performs the full protection mechanism at the home machine, which in turn limits the ability of the attacker to control the visiting mobile agent. Compared to previous approaches, both the DTS and improved-DTS methods achieved better performance and higher resistance to advanced active attacks such as alternation, collusion, and DoS attacks. INDEX TERMS Agent, attack, destination machine, dummy, home machine, task.

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